Save Article

Talking Trash at Cannes

By

Anthony Kaufman

May 18, 2012 2:00 pm ET

If climate change has been a top concern for environmentalists and documentary filmmakers see, most famously, “An Inconvenient Truth” there’s a new issue coming to the fore at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Two new films premiering at the world’s most important film festival both take on the problem of waste. In “Polluting Paradise,” premiering this Friday in Cannes, Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin travels to the idyllic Turkish mountain village of Camburnu, whose way of life is threatened by the government’s decision to build a garbage landfill near the town. And in a more global approach, British filmmaker Candida Brady’s “Trashed” (premiering next Tuesday) follows actor Jeremy Irons on a worldwide trip from Iceland to Indonesia, looking at the way pollution and pollutants have affected people’s health and livelihoods.

Both films come from the directors’ personal connection to the material.

Akin learned that distant relatives eloped to Camburnu, so he visited the locale in 2005. “The beauty of this place blew me away. It was a hot and humid summer and everything was so lush and green. I kept walking around saying: ‘This place is paradise!’ But then the villagers said to me: ‘Not for much longer. They’re building a waste landfill here soon.’ They showed me the site, which had once been an abandoned copper mine, and this immediately triggered my sense of justice. No, no landfill is going to be built here; let’s all try and prevent it together!”